Slashdot Mirror
Laptop Ban on Planes Came After Plot To Put Explosives in iPad (theguardian.com)
Last week, United States and United Kingdom officials announced new restrictions for airline passengers from eight Middle Eastern countries, forbidding passengers to carry electronics larger than a smartphone into an airplane cabin. Now The Guardian reports, citing a security source, the ban was prompted in part by a plot involving explosives hidden in a fake iPad. From the report: The security source said both bans were not the result of a single specific incident but a combination of factors. One of those, according to the source, was the discovery of a plot to bring down a plane with explosives hidden in a fake iPad that appeared as good as the real thing. Other details of the plot, such as the date, the country involved and the group behind it, remain secret. Discovery of the plot confirmed the fears of the intelligence agencies that Islamist groups had found a novel way to smuggle explosives into the cabin area in carry-on luggage after failed attempts with shoe bombs and explosives hidden in underwear. An explosion in a cabin (where a terrorist can position the explosive against a door or window) can have much more impact than one in the hold (where the terrorist has no control over the position of the explosive, which could be in the middle of luggage, away from the skin of the aircraft), given passengers and crew could be sucked out of any subsequent hole.
From where you think they got this "exploding electronic" idea, humm?
if you wear your seatbelt like you're supposed to, you won't get sucked out of the hole.
I'm not an explosives expert, but maybe someone who is can comment on the plausibility of this? It seems like an ipad or laptop couldn't carry enough explosives to take the plane down.
Now what?
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
A colleague of mine was **adamant** that because he could quantify the amount of harm Bush had done to the country in terms of lost troops, money, etc. and could not do the same with Obama (Arab Spring, Benghazi, etc.) that Obama was simply not in the same league. My response was that Obama was actually worse because while Bush weakened the old order that kept a lid on the extremists in the name of spreading dumbocracy in the Middle East, he didn't help overturn regimes like the Mubarak or Gaddafi regimes which kept a lid on some serious, organized problems.
So now what we have is worse than a world where the problems can be quantified, we live in a disordered world in which people continue to derp about "free and open societies" with global travel, as their own elected leaders have all but played the role of the Joker (Ledger, not Leto) around the world, creating a fertile breeding ground for terrorism and organized, dangerous extremist movements. The terrorists didn't so much as win over the last sixteen years as they didn't lose.
The most rational policy at this point would be to break up the foreign enclaves in the West, deport all of the recent arrivals (like last 20 years) and set up a policy of aid in the form of both financing for repair in countries like Syria and direct military assistance to the damaged states to help them stamp out the Islamist uprisings quickly, brutally and with as little collateral damage to non-combatants as possible. If we would just take the kid gloves off the US Army and MC and let Mattis channel his inner Patton against ISIS, we could probably bring peace to Syria in six months.
Let's assume this is a real threat And obviously it is doable, you could open up an ipod, rip out the guts, and put other stuff in its place. Why just 8 countries then? If its a real threat, its a global threat. Its not all that hard for someone to fly to another country first and then travel from an allowed airport. If this is a real threat, it should be from all airports. Otherwise its just games.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Can something like this device apply for access in cabin ?
Right, MSM?
This myth was busted on Mythbusters' first season. You can *fall* out of an airplane that has had major structural failure, but you aren't going to get sucked out of your seat unless the opening is literally underneath you (and large enough).
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
was the discovery of a plot
if every time someones discovered plotting the demise of western civilization we are to enact some new pointless and myopic law for our airlines, we may as well scrap the whole idea of commercial flight. Someone could easily roll a grenade into the screening area, or the food court, or even the ticket counter and accomplish just as much if not even more than an i-pad bomb. or they could show up at a gay nightclub and kill 60 people. or shoot up a government building in San Bernadino.
Los Angeles International even had a guy show up with a high power rifle and start picking off cops and TSA agents, which went way beyond a plot, but we still dutifully strip off our shoes and throw out our bottled water in homage to the all mighty security theatre. The point of terrorism is that once you concede to being terrorized, thats it, youve lost whatever war you thought you were fighting against it.
Good people go to bed earlier.
My response was that Obama was actually worse
neurological damage much? check out the knee-jerk reaction!
We should just not allow people to fly. It's against nature anyway.
I always knew hipsters would end up killing us all.
-Styopa
rectum does it all: drugs, money, explosives, animals, and electrpnicd have all benefitted.
I demand a more thorough search.
For those too young to remember, Pan Am 103 was brought down by a cassette player with Semtex that had been placed in the hold. Portable electronics can carry enough explosives to take down a plane, even in the hold.
I will say that I worry this precaution is not enough to stop a plane from being blown out of the sky.
Do counterfeit iPads even exist, ala the community of Hackintosh tinkerers?
I know that other cpuntries will xray your tablet, so such a plot will be obvious. They will also xray your laptop and such explosive will show up as a big incongruous block. I can't speak for those 8 countries but i would be surprised if they did not xray baggage.
If this ban had been in place in place when a Samsung Note 7 caught fire in an airplane cabin the result would have been more serious. Instead of being quickly caught and dealt with as the phone battery overheated in his hand while still on ground, it is possible that it would have smoldered undetected in the middle of the cargo hold until turning into a serious conflagration in-flight. A ban like this will increase the risk of in-flight battery fires and make flying less safe.
Why are we giving these people any kind of power at all? They are a clear and present dangers to freedom and society.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Mythbusters is not very reliable regarding busting myths.
http://www.ripleys.com/weird-n...
http://www.historyandheadlines...
I guess if you modify the search a bit, you find plenty of more incidents.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
So please explain how a pilot fell out of the window of the cockpit after it broke https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The window is not underneath him http://www.bac1-11jet.co.uk/N9...
While extremely entertaining, Mythbusters are pretty bad in using Google and I would never use them as an example of why things are not possible, only to say if they are possible. (Bit like a ping doesn't say much when you don't get anything back)
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
More relevant to me, that's a pretty big hole in the plane
1 person dead, the make a hole and suck people out strategy is not very effective. Probably why it hasn't been tried.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Every Airport on the planet has an invasive screening process meant to catch these sorts of things or anything
Very simple... in security line, where ipads go thru xray machine on the belt, if an ipad is spotted, then A) wouldnt an explosive ipad look a tad different on the scanner, and B) just require everyone with an iPad/tablet/laptop be required to turn it on and do something so that the security agent knows it functions. I've seen that elsewhere where you have to turn on your phone and show that it works. Why is this any different?
On a Somali flight (Daallo Airlines Flight 159). A laptop full of explosives was smuggled aboard a flight and detonated against the airplane's hull, blowing a hole in it. The only fatality was the bomber, who was sucked out the hole.
The issue was that, in order to get this laptop around checked bag security in Mogadishu (which isn't too good, but enough so that the terrorists didn't risk carrying it through), they had to have an airport employee carry it in and hand it to the passenger. Now if this is what the USA and GB are worried about, we have a really big problem. If an airport employee can sneak in a laptop, they can sneak in anything up to the allowed carry-on size. It doesn't have to be electronics. It could be a hollowed out bible or koran. The only way to protect against this kind of threat would be to shut down all flights originating at or passing through an airport suspected of being compromised.
Have gnu, will travel.
It is hard to take seriously a report about the feasibility of explosives causing issues on airplanes when apparently, the report says people could get sucked out. Basic physics. Flow is from high pressure to low pressure because of the pressure differential. Blown out, not sucked out. If they don't even know that, how can we believe them about explosives?
that will be the day I stop flying. No trip would be worth a cavity search.
Witness BitZtream getting totally pwned!
Sorry but the whole thing smells badly. I have seen the TSA xray of my ipad pro and you cant hide shit in these devices without setting off the detectors. They could even see I had a SD card inserted.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
That wasn't the myth they were testing. As other people have pointed out, people can and have been sucked out of airplanes. As I recall, the episode you're talking about even mentioned that fact.
What they were testing was that a bullet hole in a plane could lead to "explosive decompression" and cause a large hole to suck people out. Specifically the myth that a terrorist with a gun shoots a hole in a window and that causes a large hole that people get sucked out of. And they determined that such a scenario just wouldn't work: airplane glass won't fracture like that, and the hole the bullet creates wouldn't be large enough to cause enough suction to suck people out.
But they never tested anything like an exploding iPad or laptop. They were specifically testing shooting holes in a plane with a gun.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
Not sucked out of a hole - blown out of a hole. But don't worry, that's a very common misconception.
Don't they already require that any electronic device have enough battery to be powered on and therefore prove that its insides were not replaced?
I could imagine some cases in which you replace the second HDD with explosives in a laptop, but X-rays would detect that, hopefully.
But that gives a bit more insight on their choice to ban this class of electronics altogether, and I think it makes sense; or is understandable, at the very least.
Here in the US they even force you to remove your shoes for x-ray inspection, wouldn't an I-Pad packed with explosives stick out on an x-ray like a sore thumb? There are dozens of places where you could hide explosives better (luggage, coats, canes, markers, etc), this simply sounds like more security theater to me.
All passengers' anuses to be explored and sealed with epoxy glue prior to boarding.
It's unlikely that anyone is going to get sucked out. But a large enough explosion can cause a failure in the structure of the aircraft, in which case you're in world of shit. It's unlikely that they could pack enough explosives in an iPad to cause major structural components to fail (e.g. wing spar) but airframes are a wonderfully sophisticated balance of force/stress and bad things happen when you tip that balance. The linked Aloha incident is a perfect example of just how a plane can be fragile yet robust at the same time. The front top of the cabin completely ripped off (no exaggeration, make sure you're wearing your brown pants before looking at the pictures) because of fatigue failure but the frame of the aircraft remained functional enough for the pilots to retain control and land it. Unfortunately, one flight attendant was ripped out by air currents. If this had happened to a larger aircraft further away from land there's a good chance the outcome would have been different. The cabin would be taking additional, unplanned, stress from the wind blowing into the cabin for a longer period of time. This would be exacerbated by the need to fly at a lower altitude with denser air (maximum of 14,000 ft so the passengers can breath). Your fuel budget is going to be completely blown and any chance of a successful water landing is gone. This not even factoring in the possibility of the explosion taking out electronic or hydraulic flight surface control. Repair manuals for commercial airframes are available online so it is possible to deduce where to place an explosive to have maximum effect (both from a structual and control point of view).
So let's get this straight.
An unknown terrorist from an unknown group in an unknown country allegedly plotted to carry a small amount of explosives in a makeshift ipad at an unknown time and place, and that's why no one is allowed laptops anymore?
Ladies and gentlemen, you wanted to know just how stupid they think we are?
This many.
Have a drone follow behind the airplane. It will be loaded with all the things that can explode. There's your AI.
This myth was busted on Mythbusters' first season. You can *fall* out of an airplane that has had major structural failure, but you aren't going to get sucked out of your seat unless the opening is literally underneath you (and large enough).
What the Mythbusters showed is that the decompression is not as dramatic as people expect from the movies. People far from the explosion won't be affected by a hole. But they didn't show that you can't get sucked at all, or if they did I question it since this happened before in a dramatic way, and in neither case was the person sucked out directly above the hole or close enough to fall.
Mythbusters tested a small bullet hole in a pressurized fuselage. The thing about pressure is it's a force per unit of area. So the larger the opening, the larger the forces involved (until the pressure is equalized). So something as small as a bullet hole doesn't result in large forces.
Aloha Airlines flight 243 lost the forward section of its fuselage. The flight attendant standing in row 2 near the front of the failed section was hit in the head by debris and fell to the floor. The flight attendant standing in row 5 near the rear of the failed section, with all the force of the cabin air behind her, was blown out by the decompression.
Airline fuselages are designed to suffer decompression only in a small section. You literally design weak sections surrounded by a lattice of strong sections, so a crack or failure cannot unzip the skin around the entire plane as it did in Aloha 243. The failure aboard Aloha is suspected to have started on the left side (one of the passengers noticed a crack by the door while boarding). And the theory is the crack failed producing a small hole. The flight attendant was blown towards the hole by outrushing air, and her body momentarily plugged the initial hole. This caused a pressure hammer from the air behind her rushing forward towards that hole blew out the entire forward cabin overhead.
SEXY
That was two years ago.
http://www.defenseone.com/thre...
It's a good thing Terrorists don't know about connecting flights, otherwise instead of taking a flight direct from a banned city to the USA, they'd take their iPad on a flight that connects through a non-banned city, perhaps even transferring from a Middle Eastern airline to a Western airline so they punish even more westerners.
Which is the same problem the USA has with domestic flights -- an attacker doesn't have to breach security at a large airport, they just need to bribe some random TSA worker in any of thousands of small airports to smuggle a box full of "drugs" that's really the explosive or weapon he wants. The person doing the smuggling doesn't even need to be in on it, they can think they are a well paid drug mule while they deliver a box of explosives to someone at JFK.
Without further details, this story of a plot sounds as though it could be just that - a story. One created to justify further restrictions that lead to further reflexive obedience to authority. I'm not saying there wasn't a plot; but without further information and confirmation, the whole things smacks of propaganda.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
They all come from the factory with a bomb.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
A plot -- from an unnamed country, from unnamed sources, with details in secret, with the end result meaning more security and more importantly, more money being sent to security services that the regulators own are are invested in for this additional screening. Meanwhile you can rent a U-haul truck for $50 and plow through hundreds of people on the street, or buy a $500 rifle and head to a nightclub to do your damage. Human damage of course, not monetary damage, since planes are expensive, and fear of flying due to terrorist attacks keeping people out of airports is much more so.
Why put a bomb in an iPad, when you can have a Samsung 7 with a natural tendency to explode?
What they were testing was that a bullet hole in a plane could lead to "explosive decompression" and cause a large hole to suck people out.
They had to answer the question that has been on everybody's mind for all these years
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
and let's get to a funeral on-time for a change. you let me finger your bunghole, not like it is private property anymoar.
Ban the middle eastern people, not electronics. Strike at the problem itself instead of pandering to the pussies who call themselves bleeding heart libs.
But they never tested anything like an exploding iPad or laptop. They were specifically testing shooting holes in a plane with a gun.
In fact they also tested blowing up a window with explosives, and then blowing out the side of the plane with a very large explosive. They still concluded that modern planes are very structurally sound and that it would suck for the person sitting next to the explosives, but everyone else will just get a bunch of air rushing past. Also covered in the more extreme scenario of a spacecraft decompressing in zero atmosphere by Kyle Hill of Because Science.
A recursive sig
Can impart wisdom and truth
Call proc signature()
Mythbusters does less science than the catholic church.
Not surprising, given that the entire university system was invented by Catholic monks who sought to uncover the physical rules of the universe. (Investigating the rules of physics was seen as investigating God's work, and therefore a holy endeavour.)
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
They banned liquids from airplaines when they had a indication that terrorist would use liquid explosives to bomb a plane.
A month after they publishd a small article proclaiming that there was nothing to the rumor. They searched alot of homes etc but could not find a trace of these liquid terrorists. And then liquid's became forbidden to bring.
Would not be suprised if this is the same thing
Hasn't this been a concern since the 90s though? I distinctly recall my mother traveling for work a lot back in the 90s (before 9/11, mind you), and every time she'd take her laptop the airport security would ask her to turn it on to prove it was a real laptop and not a bomb. I don't know if this was the case or not, but it was implied that if she couldn't prove it was real, she wouldn't be allowed to take it in carry-on.
Could this same tactic not be used to weed out fake explosive iPads? I would presume that an iPad casing stuffed with enough explosive to cause real damage wouldn't have room for electronics to make it functional, so I imagine the same "can't prove it's real, can't take it in carry-on" security check could be used rather than a whole outright ban.
It'd void the warranty.
Isn't this ban some kind of Islamophobia?
Where are the Democrats on this!!!!??? We need a court challenge Right Away!
now what
You're already required to prove that your devices are genuine, but turning them on and operating them in view of a security agent. Is that not enough?
To me this seems more of a "our existing security theatre isn't working anymore. Time to dial it up another notch" maneuver.
Seriously...
I'm in, I love sexing women in the butt
I saw a vid (stileproject I think) where a man hid two double-A batteries in his penis and upon presentation would dispense them witg full warrantee of fitness to be used in a device.
Methinks the originalcomplain was that he could carry-on an appliance so-long as he didnt use it and they made damn well to get rid of his AA batteries. Yet he smuggled another pair of AA batteries. Im thinking it was an oral hygeine tool, as to why he chose penis and not rectum.
Funny how they sell things along terminals in marketplaces that arent allowed in flight.
The hole does not have to be literally underneath you, but the suction force won't pull you out if you are at all secured or distant from the hole.
Other factors like the motion of the plane, can throw or drop you out, or you can be sucked out if you're right next to the hole and not secured, but in practice the shrapnel from an explosive glued above one isle of seats would probably kill more people than using the same bomb as a shaped charge to blow out the wall would.
babies can increase effectiveness of explosives due to potash and sulfates in Formula, therefore...
Take a look at this picture: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/tTab0Xt.... That "roof" was the upper half of the cylindrical fuselage skin, from the cabin floor up. The flight attendant was blown out by a multi-hundred-knot wind.
Uh, just b'cos the airline is Emirates doesn't mean that they'll necessarily fly to Dubai.
You make it sounds like the West is assassinating leaders and installing puppets on a regular basis. The reality is that the Middle East was, until the Arab Spring, very stable in terms of the rate of upheaval in political systems. Europe was a basket case in the 20th century compared to the Middle East. What you see happen with the Middle East is the same thing you have in Mexico, where the PRI ruled for the better part of a century. Stability in the political class is far less important than the broader culture. A stable culture that is too corrupt (or something else very damaging) to unleash the abilities of the people to modernize and develop isn't going to get you far.
Mythbusters is not very reliable regarding busting myths.
Mythbusters is to science as pro wrestling is to sport. Ie pro wrestling is 'sports entertainment'.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
I don't understand the apparent obsession that terrorists have with air travel. If one is a terrorist looking to harm Americans, for example, it's not hard to imagine easier and more effective means than trying to blow up an airliner.
by force checking them, the plane will just explode starting from the baggage compartment rather than the cabin. totally solved.
To summarize this problem, religion has lead to electronics being banned on air planes. It doesn't matter if you believe in Islam, Mormonism, Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, or etc.... it's all the security blanket for the immature, irrational and illogical adult.
Um... this ban is another win for the terrorists.
How is this going to stop any serious threat? If I was a suicidal, radical terrorist, with the backing of an organization that can create a laptop/tablet that looks and works like a standard model, and is also a bomb, what stops me from flying out of one of the hundreds of airports not covered by this ban? Is the cost of one extra plane ticket really that much of a barrier?
In a rather famous example, several Comet planes were lost over Italy during the 1950's. The root cause was a fault in the mounting of a single window (ADF), which existed in all aircraft.The connections were riveted, not glued, so the change in pressure over time eventually led to depressurization at attitude.
So what exactly happens when the cabin depressurizes? Lungs become bruised - collapse. Skulls become fractured. All passengers were dead before the plane even hit the sea. All of this because of one faulty window.
Sure, we have those little oxygen masks in case such an event occurs on modern airliners, but given the chaotic nature of such a situation, the desired goal of creating terror would be achieved. I think a better idea would be a blanket ban on electronics in aircraft. Specifically selecting certain countries and airports does not prevent another carrier or nation from being used as an attack vector. It also opens you to unnecessary political risk, though such actions appears to gain political support back home. Long term, a better solution would be to require and distribute rapid chemical detection equipment - similar to what is used domestically here. (I'm American, btw)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BOAC_Flight_781
Close all airports, never fly again. Never let anyone, ever fly again. Close all airplane factories.
While you're at it -- Build a gaint wall around every country, and never let anyone travel farther than a 1 hour walk from home.
Look, there is a point, where, I don't care about the risk of a terrorist, when compared to the pain and hassle of avoiding every possible potential maybe but-what-if scheme could do.
Give me a waiver that says "terrorists might kill you, are you ok with this?" I'll sign it, and then we can remove all the useless pretend things that won't really stop terrorists. Deal?
They may bring explosives up their ass. Ban purses, and bags too. What a load of crock.
like the whole liquid bombing BS.
Apple has made the iPad Boom too easy to use.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
wouldn't an I-Pad packed with explosives stick out on an x-ray like a sore thumb?
Have you already had a look on say x-ray image of a tablet or smartphone ?
A very big part of the volume is occupied by the battery (intentionnally bigger to store as much power as possible), with extremly tiny electronic components and board push to the edge around it (intentionnally small, to use low-power components).
In theory it should be very easy to replace the battery (on an X-ray it's just a big slab of homogenous-looking chemical) with another similarly looking slab of explosive chemicals... i mean, intentionally explosive chemincals (lithium is also explosive, but that is not its intended main use, no matter what was happeinning to Samsung smartphones, "Hoverboard" hands-free segway-like and old Sony laptop batteries).
A bomb-containing or battery containing tablet will look the same on X-rays.
In practice, a tablet isn't big : you can't pack that much destructive energy in such a small form-factor.
For enough destructive power, you would probably need to go for a volume that ends-up looking similar to a laptop's battery.
(if you think about it, lithium batteries are already about packing as much energy as possible inside a device).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I have seen a lot of bombs being hidden in shoes and underwear. Those two should be banned too.
Oh, it's been tried. It just doesn't f'ing work. The amount of explosives required, and their precise positioning, is not something anyone is likely to ever be able to carry out. (getting enough idiots to do it isn't the issue. getting the multiple bricks of C4 on the plane, into place, and detonated at the same time...)
Actually, they did the best they could with what they had, and what they were allowed to do. As they clearly said in the episode, putting a bomb in an actual flying plane at altitude is absolutely not allowed -- no one will fly it, and the FAA won't let it in US airspace. (and they don't have the budget to blow up a fully functional 747.)
In almost every documented case, the people blown out of the plane are either not strapped in properly, or their seat went with them. In every case I'm aware of where some nut does get a bomb on board, it doesn't rip the plane in half; it makes a small hole and the plane lands safely minus the bomber (who goes out their new hole) and maybe a nearby passenger or crew member.
Racism? You do realize that Muslim is not a race and that the FAILED and TERRORIST states are the _MINORITY_ of the Muslim faith right? Twice now you have displayed that you are a complete idiot incapable of forming a thought on your own.
How's life in the hypocrite lane?
Check out the bomb in a flight from Somalia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daallo_Airlines_Flight_159
There is even a video from the inside of the plane - google it.
You can hear that it's windy, but people were not being sucked out. And the only guy who did get sucked out was the guy who had the bomb and was seated near the "wall". Even the guy seating next to him didnt get sucked out.
Who knows what explosives she bring inside....iFuck, iPenis...
Seemed pretty obvious to me. Like putting precursors to toxic gasses or explosives into those tiny shampoo bottles. I'm glad terrorists aren't very imaginative.
The autism-hating, custom EpiPen-hating, Musk-hating Slashdot troll!
It will just get filled with C4.
I think they just don't want anyone running unowned hardware in the cabin of a plane. Also, it is easier to copy all your data when the device leaves your hands.
Phones are owned, so they are allowed.
Why should we be nervous? Flying is statistically still safer than any other alternative.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
And a lot of fantasy...
The nature of colonialism is forced occupation and oppression, destruction of identity and culture, internal divides and exploitation and robbery.
This will throw any society back into poverty. If the British occupation of India was so good, then why are the standards of living in both countries not the same?
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.